How are cards with magnetic stripes printed?

Magnetic stripes are typically printed using a PVC card printer that includes a magnetic stripe programmer. A magnetic stripe is a strip of material that can be magnetized. To write data to the stripe, the card is dragged over a small electromagnet to magnetize the tiny spots on the stripe material, encoding binary data. PVC card printers and software such as ID Flow work together to make printing magnetic stripe cards as simple as printing regular documents.